


Ineffable Fangirls

by aretia



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: F/F, Ineffable Wives (Good Omens), Sort Of, This takes place in a world where Good Omens the book and show exist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:08:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21882781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aretia/pseuds/aretia
Summary: Clara and Adriana have been best friends since the beginning, or at least since middle school. Adriana is a nerdy bookworm who has lovedGood Omenssince before it was cool. Clara is a trendy hipster who fell in love withGood Omensthe series, and who desperately wants Adriana to think she's cool. But the one thing that they have most in common might also be the very thing that drives them apart, or brings them closer together than ever.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), original f/f relationship - Relationship, referenced aziraphale/crowley
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Ineffable Fangirls

**Author's Note:**

> Previously under a lyric title, "sing for me a melody that's ours" from [Starving for Friends by Slaves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql7gHUHEgrw)
> 
> this fic now has art! [here](https://arkadraws.tumblr.com/post/189908216672/adriana-left-and-clara-right-from)

JUNE 2019, SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.

Clara shifted back and forth on her feet in the crowded cafe, idly scrolling through her phone. She glanced up at the door every few seconds, the movement of her eyes hidden by the round gray sunglasses she always wore. She didn’t have a drink, and she wasn’t waiting in line to get one, even though she could use a drink in her hand to make her seem like she had business in the cafe. She was waiting for someone, but she preferred not to  _ look _ like it. 

A notification popped up at the top of her screen, and her eyes were drawn to the phone with more attention than they had been paying to it before. She didn’t have a chance to find out if it was a text worth her notice, because a flurry of blonde curls had just bounded into her peripheral vision.

“Sorry I’m late!” Adriana panted, brushing her hair back from her forehead. “I wish I had a better excuse, but the truth is I got caught up in a book and I lost track of time. By the time I looked up, I only had five minutes to get ready and head over here.”

“You haven’t changed a bit, I see. Nose buried in a book every spare second,” Clara commented. “C’mon, let’s get some coffee.”

When they reached the front of the line, Clara plopped her large red leather handbag on the counter in front of the cash register. “Oh, you don’t have to. I can pay for my own,” Adriana insisted, reaching into her own canvas tote bag. 

“It’s your first day back on Earth. I want to give you a warm welcome,” Clara said. 

“What do you mean by that?” Adriana asked, her hands wringing the straps of her tote bag. 

“You’ve been AWOL ever since you started writing your thesis,” said Clara. There was an unexpected trace of bite in her voice, as if she had accidentally knocked a dollop of horseradish into the pot while she was stirring up her sentence. She was proud of Adriana for pursuing a degree in literature, she really was, but a part of herself that she wasn’t so proud of missed the days when easy conversations with her best friend were more than a rare occurrence. 

Adriana’s face fell, and that wasn’t what Clara intended at all. She scrambled for a way to take her words back, but as soon as it had appeared on Adriana’s face, the fleeting frown was gone, replaced by a smile lifting the corners of her round apple cheeks. “Well, now the thesis is submitted, and I have my degree, and I won’t have to worry about any of that anymore, I hope,” she said. 

Clara placed their order—some kind of caramel-cream concoction for Adriana and black coffee for herself—and then busied herself with digging around inside her cavernous purse for her wallet. When she reached into the depths of the bag, the corner of a book poked out, and Adriana let out a shriek that could be heard across the cafe.

“You’re reading  _ Good Omens _ ?!” Adriana squealed. She reached over Clara’s arms to grab the book, a show tie-in copy with the figures of Michael Sheen and David Tennant printed on its cover, and a bookmark sticking out about two-thirds of the way to the end. 

“Please don’t make a big deal out of it,” Clara groaned, dragging a hand over her face. Even the cashier stared at Adriana as Clara handed over her debit card. 

“I’m sorry, I’m just so excited!” Adriana said, clutching the book to her chest. “You must know that it’s my favorite book, right?”

“Oh  _ no _ , you’re an old school fan. That’s even worse,” Clara sighed dramatically, flinging her arm over her face as they walked out of the line to stand by the counter. When Adriana only responded with a guileless tilt of her head, Clara elaborated, “You’re going to think I’m a poser for watching the show before I read the book.” 

“The only reason I would think of you that way would be if you didn’t really like it, and were just pretending you did to impress me,” Adriana said. Clara felt unraveled under her gaze then, as if she really did suspect her of such a thing, and was dissecting her to find evidence of it. “The show stands on its own just fine. What did you like about it?”

“Um,” Clara muttered eloquently. She spent so much effort crafting an aloof detachment towards everything that whenever she was asked to express her enthusiasm about something, she did so with about as much conviction as a wet noodle. “I think Crowley and Aziraphale are a cute couple,” she settled on finally.

“Ooh, getting right down to it, are we?” Adriana said with an excited wiggle of her shoulders. She propped her elbows up on the counter and leaned closer to Clara, placing her chin in her hands. “I never took you for a shipper! Which one do you relate to more?” Without giving her a chance to respond, she said, “Or are you going to make me guess?”

The barista slid their drinks across the counter, and Clara picked both of them up and led Adriana to a high table in the back of the cafe. “Guess,” she said, her throat growing tight. 

“Well,” Adriana said, reaching out to tap the corner of Clara’s sunglasses, “I’d say that everything about you points to Crowley, right down to the whole wearing sunglasses indoors thing.”

Clara self-consciously touched the frames of her sunglasses, and the spot where Adriana’s finger had brushed against her temple, and removed the glasses. It wasn’t so much that she had forgotten she was wearing them; it was more that she had a tendency to forget that other people thought it was odd to wear sunglasses indoors until someone pointed it out. “Right answer,” Clara said. “So I guess that makes you Aziraphale? Because you love reading?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Adriana said, rewarding Clara with a smile for telling her the answer she wanted to hear. 

“I have to ask, though. What made you decide to get into  _ Good Omens _ now?” Adriana asked. “I thought that if you even heard of the show, you would just brush it off like you were too cool for it.”

“I did, at first,” Clara admitted. She stared down at the lid of her coffee cup. “But then I saw how wholesome and accepting the  _ Good Omens _ fandom is. It’s not cynical or snobby like everything else on the internet seems to be these days. Everything about it just radiates love for the source material. I wanted to be a part of that.” 

She wrapped her hands around the coffee cup. So far, the bitter liquid had only been used as a hand warmer, not for actual drinking. “Being a fan of  _ Good Omens _ makes me feel like I’m a part of something bigger, something that could change my life, even change the world, as cheesy as that sounds. It kind of makes me wish that I had found it sooner.”

Adriana, who had been stirring her iced drink with her straw, stopped abruptly and leveled her with an intense gaze. “You had your chance, you know.”

“What?” Clara asked, taking the first sip of her coffee. 

“When we were in seventh grade. That was when I first read the book, and I tried to get you to read it too, but you said that books were boring. If I remember correctly, you said, ‘What kind of nerd would read a book that wasn’t assigned for class?’ You didn’t seem so keen to discover the magic of  _ Good Omens _ back then, to say the least.”

“I. Well. That’s. I don’t…” Clara stammered. “I don’t see why you need to bring that up now. I came around, didn’t I?” She cracked a nervous smile.

“Maybe, but that’s not the point,” Adriana continued. “In seventh grade, I felt like the world was too small, and I was the only person I knew who liked this weird little book. I offered to share it with you, and you spurned it. You took my love for it as an excuse to mock me instead, and you left me  _ alone _ , at a time when I needed you most.”

“It’s not like I’m the only one who’s ever left someone alone,” Clara countered, the bite in her voice very much intentional now. “You did it to me too. For four years. When you went out of state for college, you didn’t even text me for days at a time. That feels a little more significant than not reading a book, don’t you think?”

“I offered you the choice to come with me then, too! I had it all planned out. We were going to be roommates! And then you didn’t even apply!” Adriana lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “And don’t you dare tell me that you couldn’t afford it. I know your parents wanted you to go to college, too.”

“It’s not my fault that I found what I wanted to do, and it didn’t involve going to college,” Clara said. She had gotten a job at a local plant nursery while she was in high school, and that was where she had stayed for the past four years, while she waited around for Adriana and pretended that wasn’t what she was doing. She stuck with it, even though she knew that some people, like her parents, thought of retail jobs as lowly and a waste of her potential. It stung to know that Adriana thought of it that way too. 

“You still could have gone with me, and then come back to the garden shop,” Adriana said, her voice softening, like she realized that what she said had touched a nerve. She reached out to place her hand over Clara’s, but Clara crossed her arms.

“My life choices aren’t what’s on trial here,” Clara huffed. “We were talking about  _ Good Omens _ . I still can’t see what your problem is with me liking it. You got what you wanted, right? The world isn’t small anymore. Everyone has heard of it. You can hardly say that you’re alone now.”

“I know. That’s kind of the problem, honestly,” Adriana said. “Being in the  _ Good Omens _ book fandom was like having a cozy little cottage. I shared it with lots of people online, but it was my home.” She used Clara’s book on the table as a prop, making a box around it with her hands. 

“But then, the show came along and it was like someone built a giant hotel around the cottage.” Adriana then spread her hands that were around the book to reach past the edges of the table. “They tried to preserve the cottage, but they still had to knock away bits of it here and there to make room for the hotel. Now, there are so many people wandering through the cottage that it’ll never be the same anymore. The fandom still tries to pay homage to the cottage, but there are some things that only those of us who were there before will know.”

“ _ That _ was what I wanted to share with you,” Adriana concluded. “That sense of belonging to something that was your own. But now, I don’t know how you can ever understand what I feel.”

“It sounds like you don’t even  _ like _ the show,” Clara observed. “You don’t just think I’m a poser. You think all show fans are posers.”

“I never said poser. That’s  _ your _ word for someone who pretends to be cool with nothing behind it.” She shot Clara a pointed glance, and Clara gulped. When directed at her like that, Clara’s favorite insult sounded like it applied to her more than she could bear to admit. “But no, I don’t have a problem with show fans, if they’re sincere. And I do like the show, for the record.”

“Then why are you acting like it was the worst thing that could have happened to your precious little ‘cottage,’ as you called it?” Clara brought out the sarcastic air quotes for that one. If they were bringing up old grudges and behaving like middle schoolers, she might as well bring back her old habits that should have died with that era. 

“It wasn’t! It’s just different now,” Adriana said. “We knew that things would change, but a lot of us were really looking forward to it.” 

“By ‘we,’ do you mean  _ your _ side, the book fans?” Clara hissed. It was all coming out now, the air quotes, the rolling eyes. If Crowley turned more snakelike when he was emotional, then Clara turned into a middle schooler. “Stop treating the show like it’s some bastardized version of the book. It was made with a lot of love, too.”

“Of course I know that! I know that better than you, of all people!” Adriana snapped. She slammed her hands down on the table. “The show was made for those of us who had spent our lives waiting for it. You didn’t burn long and slow for it like I did.  _ You don’t deserve it! _ ”

That tore through Clara like a shock wave, knocking the breath out of her lungs and making her stumble on her feet. “Adri…”

The recoil of Adriana’s words came back to her. She clasped her hands over her mouth. “Clara, I’m sorry, I…”

Clara snatched her book up in her arms and shoved it back into her purse. She picked up her now-cold coffee cup and downed the rest of it in one gulp. 

“You’re right, I don’t,” she said. 

On her way to storm out the door, she threw the coffee cup against the wall, and it bounced into the trash can. She pulled her sunglasses out of her collar and slipped them back onto her face to hide the tears that were burning at the corners of her eyes. 

~

Clara finished reading  _ Good Omens _ that night. Through blurred eyes and despite the tear-stained pages, she finished it. She hadn’t started reading it for Adriana, and she wouldn’t let Adriana take it away from her, either. 

She read about a bookshop burning. She read about a missing angel who hadn’t had a chance to make contact after he was whisked away. She read about a demon who picked up a book of prophecies, with absolutely no evidence that everything was going to be okay, and drove off to save the world anyway. 

Clara had resigned herself to letting her unrequited affection for Adriana eat her up inside for the rest of her lifetime, but this time it really seemed like she and Adriana might stop being friends, and she could not accept that future, not even for a second. It would be worse than the end of the world. 

Like Aziraphale, Adriana could be unintentionally insensitive, self-centered, and altogether infuriating, but that was all part of what made her worth liking. Like Crowley, Clara didn’t know the meaning of giving up. 

Like Crowley, she would pick her heart up off the ground, dust it off, and try again. 

She stood on Adriana’s doorstep with a brown-wrapped parcel in her hands, and rang the doorbell. She had planned to ding-dong ditch and leave the package at the door, but then Adriana appeared through the window, much faster than she could have if she was coming from her second-story bedroom. It was almost as if she had been waiting by the door for Clara to show up and apologize, or had been thinking about going to Clara’s apartment herself and doing the same. Clara didn’t wish for either of those to be true.

“Clara?” Adriana said when she opened the door.

“I know you probably don’t want to talk to me right now,” Clara said. “I just came to drop this off.”

“What is it?” Adriana asked, taking the package from her hands.

“Just open it.” 

Adriana tore off the corner of the brown paper, revealing the white edge of a book cover inside, and gasped. “It’s…” She unwrapped the rest of the package, and pulled out a pristine older copy of  _ Good Omens _ , with an etching of Crowley holding a wine glass on the cover. 

“Not just any copy of  _ Good Omens _ ,” said Clara. “It’s  _ your _ copy.”

Without the package to hold in her hands, Clara didn’t know what to do with them, so she folded them behind her back as she paced on Adriana’s front step. “You remember in seventh grade, when you tried to get me to read  _ Good Omens _ , and you gave me your copy of it? I kept trying to return it to you, but you always said that I could only give it back once I had finished it. Well, now I’ve finished it, so I dug it up out of the moving boxes in my apartment so that I could give it back to you.”

She still couldn’t look Adriana in the eyes, so she ran a hand through her auburn hair and let it drape in front of her face. “To tell you the truth, I  _ did _ think books were boring. The show gave me a format that I could process easily, and it made me curious enough to read the book. If I had forced myself to read it back then, I don’t think it would have meant as much to me as it does now. Even though I wasn’t there for the evolution of the book fandom, I feel grateful that it came into my life when I was ready to appreciate it.”

She looked up to meet Adriana’s eyes then, sky blue eyes shining back at her through large, round gold-rimmed glasses. “I'm sorry that I brushed you off back then. I’m sorry that I made you feel alone. If you feel like I don’t deserve to have this book, then here it is, all yours.” She offered her heart to Adriana along with the book. She braced herself for the inevitable pain of getting it thrown in the dirt again.

Adriana only gazed reverently at the book, then back up at Clara. “You saved my book,” she said.

“Saved?” Clara repeated. Adriana’s choice of words brought to mind a scene in a church, and a lullaby swelling in the background, and emotions that Clara was entirely unprepared to handle. 

“This wasn’t my only copy,” Adriana said. “But mine got a little... damaged. Let me show you.” She ducked into the living room, and reappeared with another copy of  _ Good Omens _ in her hands. This one was worse for wear; the spine and cover were cracked, the pages were wavy from water damage, and one corner had what looked like black char marks on it. “They say that all well-loved copies of  _ Good Omens _ get destroyed over time. I left mine too close to the stove while I was making tea, and the corner caught fire. I threw water on it to put it out, and that’s why it looks like this.” She gingerly flipped through the crinkled pages. “Even though it’s nearly impossible to read it this way, I couldn’t bear to throw it out and get a new copy, because…”

She held up the two books in both of her hands. In her right hand, she had her own copy, a black cover with Aziraphale etched on it, and in her left hand was the one Clara had given back to her, white with Crowley on the cover. “I bought us matching books,” she explained. “I didn’t even know if you would end up being a Crowley, but I knew I was an Aziraphale, so I gave you the one that I thought suited you. This was always meant to be your copy.” She pushed it back towards Clara, who took it gently, as if it could crumble to dust in her hands.

Adriana had handed Clara’s heart back to her unscathed. No, she had accepted it, and offered her own. 

“That was how badly I wanted this to be  _ our _ thing,” Adriana said. “So I’m sure you can imagine how betrayed I felt when you didn’t even want to read it. I’ve had all this resentment festering inside me for ten years, and I took it out on you today. I’m sorry I said that you didn’t belong. That was wrong of me. I was hurt that when you finally got into  _ Good Omens _ , it had nothing to do with me. I would understand if you still wanted it to have nothing to do with me. But if you want, it can be our thing now. It doesn’t matter how long it took.”

“Are you sure?” said Clara.

“Yes.” Adriana’s golden curls bounced as she gave a single, emphatic nod. 

“No, I mean, are you sure you want to give this back to me?” Clara pushed the white book back into Adriana’s hands, and reached into her purse to pull out her copy, the one that she had already read and cried on and treasured. “I already have my own copy. I think you deserve to have both. One that you can actually read, and one to be sentimental about.” 

Adriana tucked the book under her arm next to her own cherished copy. The Crowley and Aziraphale illustrations were facing each other, like they had been separated for too long and didn’t ever want to be apart from each other again. “Thank you, Clara.”

“No problem, ang—”

Clara realized the word that was about to come out of her mouth, and choked on her tongue. 

It was too late. Adriana had already noticed. A mischievous grin glittered on her face. “What was that?”

“N-nothing!” Clara sputtered, her cheeks flushing. She was usually not the blushing type, and she hated to think how uncool she must look right now. “Adri. I meant to say Adri. Just-just a slip of the tongue—”

Her rambling was interrupted by a flood of sensations all at once. Adriana’s arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her close against her pillow-soft chest. Her plump lips made contact with Clara’s, and she tilted her head to the side so that their mouths interlocked. A playful swipe of Adriana’s tongue against her lower lip made Clara’s head spin, and she felt like she would collapse if Adriana wasn’t there to hold on to her. 

Adriana’s lips drifted away, leaving barely an inch between their faces as she looked up at Clara through coquettishly fluttering eyelashes. “Oops. Just a slip of the tongue,” she teased.

Clara wished that she could think of something witty in response. She really did. But her mouth only existed for one purpose in that moment, and it wasn’t talking. Her hands found purchase in Adriana’s fluffy curls and in the soft, yielding flesh underneath her jaw, and pulled her into another kiss. Adriana’s tongue eagerly lapped into her mouth again, and Clara’s responded in earnest. The tantalizing little moans Adriana let out when Clara nibbled at her lip urged her to keep going, and the pleasure that surged through her every time Adriana’s lips met hers made her want to stay like this forever.

Overwhelmed in the best way, Clara broke the kiss, taking a moment to breathe and let her mind catch up with her body. They settled into a cozy embrace, with Adriana’s head fitting neatly into the curve just above Clara’s collarbone.

"I never knew that the Crowley to my Aziraphale was right in front of me all along," Adriana said breathlessly. 

"That’s the point, isn’t it?” Clara replied. “All it took was the end of the world for you to realize it." 

“Something like that,” Adriana agreed with a giggle, pressing another kiss to Clara’s neck.

There almost definitely was not a nightingale singing in the trees above Adriana’s house, because nightingales are not native to the United States, but they both heard its melody nonetheless, as certain as if it were there. They knew, with even more certainty, that a particular angel and demon were smiling down on them.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The persons depicted herein are fictional. They are based on Aziraphale and Crowley, but Adriana and Clara are not based on any real interactions that I have seen between Good Omens book and show fans. They represent two sides of myself, and sorting out the feelings I had about whether I would fit in to the Good Omens fandom as a new show fan. If anything, I wrote this as a love letter to the Good Omens fandom, because it is accepting of everyone and I have never seen anyone act like this, to me or to each other. I have rarely seen the distinction made at all. We’re on our own side. <3


End file.
